Struggling to conceive meant facing my own stereotypes about being a Hispanic woman

The first time I was pregnant, I smugly told my husband that my father had upgraded my mother's car each time she delivered one of my siblings. She'd also become accustomed to mariachis serenading outside her hospital window at dawn.

While I wasn't anticipating a car or serenades, I was expecting to deliver. At 34, I was fit and active. I was one of 11 children—I took for granted that when the time came, I'd slather cocoa butter on my stretch marks just as my mother and older sister had.

Then I miscarried, at the end of the first trimester. "It's common," everyone reassured me, and as a health educator I knew that was true. But when it happened again less than a year later, I pinwheeled into despair.

Truth was, I hadn't always yearned to be a mother. Growing up, I'd diapered, fed and reared several of my younger siblings. When I moved away for college, I'd reasoned with my elders, "Anyone can have a baby, but not a degree." And I adored the life I'd built since, full of challenging work, friends, travel. But as the months passed, I couldn't shake the irrational feeling I'd brought this on myself, and a sticky film of shame and guilt plagued me like sweat.

I also realized how much I'd been counting on motherhood to reconnect me with my large family. I rallied my emotions to attend all our baby showers, baptisms and kids' parties, but I felt like more of an outsider than ever. It's God's will, my mother heralded, adding her signature counsel, "Hay que ser muy mujer"—You have to be strong, like women are—not realizing how those words stung. My grandmother blessed me and pressed her beloved San Judas novena card into my hands. "No one in this family is infertile," she cooed. "You're just a late bloomer."

The next year, at the same time my friends were sending out birth announcements, my third pregnancy ended in emergency surgery. The fetus had implanted itself in my right fallopian tube, which eventually ruptured. My already low chances of conceiving were cut in half. At the hospital, I wept in my husband's arms. We knew this was it for us. We wouldn't try in vitro fertilization—my body had been through enough.

In the years that followed, the ache didn't disappear, but it did ease. It helped that in the end my experience brought me closer to my family: With moist eyes, my mother eventually revealed her anguish over her own miscarriages. And my husband and I did try parenthood again—this time through adoption, bringing home two toddlers from Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. Today, they're young men forging their way into the world. Their steps echo my hard-won understanding: Motherhood takes its own path.

How to support a friend who's trying to get pregnant

Keep including her. Even if you think that a baby shower or kid's birthday might be too painful for your friend to attend, let her make that call. Feeling isolated or left out can be a major side effect of infertility.

Don't give her advice. Her doctor probably has plenty of that, and admonishments to "Relax!" or "Just take a cruise!" can make her feel blamed.

Check in. Let her set the boundaries on how much she wants to share, but do open the door by asking her how she's doing and letting her know you're there for her. Sometimes simply having someone to talk to can be an incredible help.